read-components

Read Twitter Bower components.

Install with npm install read-components.

read-components was made for automatic builders like Brunch. Automatic means you don’t need to specify bower files which will be built. Instead, read-components reads root bower.json, opens bower.json of all packages and their dependencies and auto-calculates concatenation order.

Component JSON file must have main property.

Every component which is handled by bower must have "main" property in bower.json. You can specify this in your own bower.json in overrides section. See below for examples.

Why

For automatic builds, read-components requires files to have dependencies and main properties specified. But not all bower packages have bower.json with main property specified. I’d say less than 50%. So parsing these will fail:

// Root bower.json
{
  ...
  "dependencies": {
    "chaplin": "*"
  }
}

// bower_components/chaplin/bower.json
{
  ...
  "dependencies": {"backbone": "*"}
}

// bower_components/backbone/bower.json
{// no deps, no `main`}

read-components solves the problem by allowing user to specify bower.json overrides in root config file.

For example, if your root bower.json looks like that

{
  "dependencies": {"chaplin": "*"},
  "overrides": {
    "backbone": {
      "main": "backbone.js",
      "dependencies": {
        "underscore": "~1.5.0",
        "jquery": "~2.0.0"
      }
    }
  }
}

read-components will treate backbone bower.json as completed and will produce correct output for automatic builders.

Usage

Node.js:

var read = require('read-components');

read('your-project-dir-with-bower.json', 'bower', function(error, components) {
  console.log('All components:', components);
});

read('.', 'bower', function(error, components) {});

Output is a list of packages like this:

[{ "name": "d",
  "version": "1.0.2",
  "files": [ "/Users/john/project/bower_components/d/index.js" ],
  "dependencies": { },
  "sortingLevel": 2 },
{ "name": "e",
  "version": "1.0.1",
  "files": [ "/Users/paul/project/bower_components/e/index.js" ],
  "dependencies": { "d": "~1.0.0" },
  "sortingLevel": 1 } ]

Each package will also have sortingLevel and files specified. You can use it to get concatenation order like this:

// Note that it is sorted like this by default.
packages
  .sort(function(a, b) {
    var field = 'sortingLevel';
    return b[field] - a[field];
  })
  .map(function(pkg) {
    return pkg.files;
  });

License

MIT (c) 2016 Paul Miller (http://paulmillr.com)